I'm sharing it here because I thought you all might be interested in what he sounded like.Īs Bob Weir told me a few days after Bear died: “He got plenty done this time around.”Īudio excerpts from an interview with Bear JanuPart 1 I have nearly six hours of tape from our January 1991 interview, which was published in the book Conversations with the Dead. His take: "Yes, Bear was a pretty crumpled sight at first, but he got going pretty well. Our mutual friend, luthier and Alembic co-founder Rick Turner, got to the party after I left. My wife saw him with a blender making a puree of nearly-raw meat and deviled eggs. From his posture, I gathered his neck was fused or the muscles had been damaged he seemed unable to move his head much. He had had a cardiac bypass (a result, he told me without irony, of the vegetables he had been fed as a child) and been treated for throat cancer, and as a result he was unable to swallow solid food and had a great deal of trouble talking. I thought then that he wasn't long for this world. The last time I saw him was in June of 2007, on what I believe was his last visit to the States. It seemed pretty crackpottish at the time, and of course the predicted event did not go down on the date he forecast – but I recognize now that Bear was the first person I knew to bring up a subject that is today a huge and urgent matter: climate change. "When your number's oop, it's oop," said someone else, quoting George Harrison. Lesh demurred, stating that if this climate-change catastrophe were to take place, he'd climb up onto the ridge behind his then-home and watch it go down. He had a sheaf of visa applications to distribute to his audience so we could begin the emigration process immediately. He showed us a climate map showing mean temperatures at the peak of the last Ice Age, and pointed to a spot in Australia where there was both habitable climate and land underfoot – and where he already owned property. One night in 1983, he came to Phil Lesh's house with a sheaf of maps and delivered a lecture of a couple of hours' duration, explaining how a thermal cataclysm would begin with a storm over Baffin Bay in Canada and suck all the heat out of the atmosphere, rendering most of the planet uninhabitable by humans. He managed better than most other people to bend reality to suit his wishes and beliefs.Īnd he had some weird beliefs. Few who knew him would have been surprised if he had chosen to live forever. 60 on the Billboard 200.Owsley "Bear" Stanley died in a car crash in Australia on March 13. It was recorded on February 13 and 14, 1970, and offers concert highlights from the show at the Fillmore East in New York City. The live album by the band was released in July of 1973 on Warner Bros. History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice) That amounts to more than 5,000,000 doses. By his own account, he produced at least 500 grams between 19. He was reportedly the first known private person to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. He also helped develop the group’s “wall of sound.” Many in the media called him the Acid King. He was the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead and recorded many of the group’s live performances. Said Bear of the bears, “the bears on the album cover are not really ‘dancing.’ I don’t know why people think they are their positions are quite obviously those of a high-stepping march.”Īn American-Australian audio engineer, “Bear” was a key figure in the Bay Area hippie movement in the ’60s. The bears themselves are a reference to Owsley “Bear” Stanley, who recorded and produced the album upon which they appear. Thomas said that he based the depictions on a lead sort, which is a block with a typographic character etched on it, from an unknown font. Drawn by Bob Thomas as part of the back cover for the band’s 1973 album, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice), the “dancing” bears may not even be dancing at all.
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